Effective strategy execution relies on the alignment of your company’s work and your workforce. Now more than ever, as pandemic market conditions force business leaders to make tough decisions about allocating scarce resources across all of their priorities, it’s essential to get the right people on the most strategic work to ensure success. But first, you need to know who in your company has the right expertise for that work. 

When looking for people to staff on new projects, many team leaders gather information on who’s working on what, who has the skills needed for the new work, and who’s available to move on to another project. Getting all of this information requires a level of visibility into overall strategy execution and individual contributions that many leaders simply don’t have. In the Catalant Platform, we’ve designed our individual profiles to provide that visibility to enable more effective resource allocation.

BREAKING IT DOWN

Information on what work is being executed and who is doing that work often comes from informal networks inside the organization. But connecting with colleagues to gather information can paint an incomplete picture of a person’s work since employees can split their time working with multiple stakeholders who may not have a full view of their work or its overall quality. It can also be difficult to tie someone’s work directly to project outcomes. And with personal reviews, it’s possible that internal politics or bias can get in the way of finding the best person for the project. 

Leaders also turn to LinkedIn to find people across their company, especially when the size or scope of their business unit makes it difficult to know everyone with the expertise they’re looking for. Even then, LinkedIn is an imperfect substitute for true visibility: LinkedIn profiles can read more like a job description than a record of someone’s work, and their public nature will keep out specific details about work they’ve done in your organization that can help you understand the context of their work.

Everyone uses the lingua franca of the LinkedIn profile to determine the right people for the right work—but what happens when the limitations of the language don’t express what you want to say? 

That’s why we’ve created our employee profiles to provide even more visibility into the work people have done and the results that work has driven. Using information from a LinkedIn profile as a starting point, we build a living log of all the work someone’s done at your company. 

In addition to education, work experience at previous companies, and skills, a Catalant profile contains a work summary of all the projects that someone has worked on or is working on, all in one place. It’s possible to click directly into each project and view details about the work and that person’s role, including the skills they needed to use to accomplish the goals of the project.

Upon completing a project, project owners can provide feedback on a team member’s work that will be visible on their profile as a testimonial. It’s an easy way to get information on the quality of someone’s work on a project, directly from the project owner. 

Focusing directly on the work required by projects, the skills and expertise needed from those working on them, and the results produced creates a fuller record of performance on strategic work. Additionally, with a more data- and results-driven view of achievement, team leaders can better allocate resources based on merit. 

These details in combination with the platform’s resource planning tools can provide a more complete picture of who is ready, willing, able, and available to work on the most important projects you need done.

Knowing who in your organization is right for your most important work can be a huge challenge, especially across large organizations made more dispersed with the increase in remote work during the pandemic era. With the Catalant Platform, you can gain the visibility you need to get the right people on the right work and get from strategy to execution faster.